Category: Kettle Brand

Oh, potato chips. I wish I could quit you, like I’ve stopped downloading freaky foreign internet porn and buying awful movies from the $5 DVD bin at Walmart with laughable titles like Mexican Werewolf In Texas and Hoochie Mama Drama. But you’re so difficult to shake, like a guy with vice grips for hands holding on to the roof of a speeding car while it goes around the NÃ¼rburgring in Germany.

I wish there was some kind of 12-step program to help me overcome my potato chip addiction because I have a weak soul that easily gives in to tater temptations. It’s so hard for my tongue to resist the equation: potato + hot oil = delicious. Once I pop, I can’t stop until half the bag is gone or until I get a sore stomach or until the bag is taken away from me using force.

It wouldn’t be so bad if potato chips had less fat. Although folks have tried to make low-fat potato chips using the synthetic oil, Olestra. However, for some reason people didn’t care for its possible anal leakage side effect.

A one ounce serving of Lays classic potato chips has 10 grams of fat, which is 16 percent of our daily value. So if I ate half a bag of Lays potato chips in one sitting, while watching a NCIS marathon on the USA Network, I would have consumed 60 grams of fat or 96 percent of my daily value. Oh, if only there was a way I could eat half a bag of potato chips without the guilt and the need to eat raw vegetables for the rest of the day to compensate for the potato chips.

How did Kettle Brands make these chips have less fat? Don’t know and don’t care, unless it involves Olestra or a deal with the Devil. But it’s not the ingredients since it’s as simple of a list as their regular Sea Salt potato chips — potatoes, safflower and/or sunflower oil, and sea salt. It probably involves something that includes the word “proprietary” in its name.

As a fan of regular Kettle Brand Sea Salt potato chips, I’m quite familiar with its flavor. Heck, I’m such as fan that just thinking about them makes my mouth water and my hands shake. God, I need a potato chip fix right now. So does this reduced fat version taste just as good as the full fat version, which has 9 grams of fat per serving? Not quite. Does it taste good for a 40% reduced fat potato chip? Most definitely.

(Sidenote: The 40% is determined by comparing these chips with “regular potato chips” (i.e. Lays potato chips) and not their own regular sea salt potato chips.)

The chip’s potato flavor isn’t as robust as the regular version, but it does have the same delightful crunch. It seems Kettle Foods tries to make up for the slight loss of flavor due to the reduction in fat by including 45 milligrams more sodium per serving than the regular stuff, but I don’t think it’s saltier. However, the flavor difference is slight enough that I think if you emptied a bag into a bowl and left it out for your guests, no one would be any the wiser. After all, not everyone’s tongue and gut fat is as familiar with Kettle Brand Sea Salt potato chips as mine.

The Kettle Brand 40% Reduced Fat Sea Salt Potato Chips are pretty gosh darn good and I’ll probably end up replacing the regular stuff with it so that I can go on a potato chip bender with less guilt.

Because I inhale Kettle Brand potato chips with a suction that is only bested by a Dyson vacuum cleaner, I tend to consume an entire 8-ounce bag in one couch potato-ing session. Of course, doing so makes it hard for me to keep my girlish figure. Fortunately for my girlish figure, Kettle Brand is releasing new line of reduced fat potato chips that come in some of their most popular flavors — Sea Salt, Sea Salt & Vinegar, and Salt & Fresh Ground Pepper.

The reduced fat potato chips will have 40 percent less fat than their regular counterparts. But, just like the regular versions of their chips they will contain non-GMO ingredients and contain no preservatives, no artificial colors or flavors, and no MSG.

To give you an idea of how different the reduced fat version is from the regular version:

Kettle Brand Reduced Fat Sea Salt potato chips are available now in 8-ounce bags and have a suggested retail price of $3.49. Salt & Fresh Ground Pepper and Sea Salt & Vinegar will be released in August.

I don’t have any command of the Spanish language, and some might argue I also don’t have a command of the English language, so it’s been difficult to find out why Kettle Brands calls their line of tortilla chips TIAS! I thought the internet would help, but it was quite useless.

When I looked up “tias” on an online language translator, it told me it means aunts in Spanish. When I looked it up on Wikipedia, it told me Tias is a city on the Canary Islands and it’s also the Treaties and Other International Acts Series, a document printed by the U.S. Department of State.

When I looked up the word on YouTube, I hoped to find telenovela clips, but instead I found lots of videos with voluptuous girls in bikinis and slideshows of girls smashing their boobs together to form cleavage while booty music plays in the background. Those videos eventually lead me to tanga videos, and those videos caused YouTube to suggest I watch Brazilian bunda clips.

After spending half a day on YouTube watching a never-ending stretch of booty and boobs, I still don’t have any clue why these Kettle Brand Nacho Cheddar Tortilla Chips are called TIAS!

The Nacho Cheddar TIAS! sound like the Toyota Prius of cheese-flavored triangle tortilla chips because they’re all-natural, mostly made from organic ingredients and I felt smug after buying them. Let me tell you, since I bought this bag of Nacho Cheddar TIAS!, I have felt a high level of disdain toward Doritos eaters. It’s a level I haven’t felt since I watched myself eat an entire bag of Doritos in front of a mirror.

If you read what the packaging says, it’s easy to feel smug: ZERO grams of trans fat, ONLY all natural colors and flavors, ONLY natural oils, NO preservatives, NON-GMO ingredients and REAL food ingredients. These Kettle Brand Nacho Cheddar TIAS! may make me feel like an asshole, but at least I can be an asshole while eating something awfully appetizing.

While not as cheesy as Doritos, they have a more authentic cheese flavor. The amount of seasoning on each chip looks ample, but it doesn’t translate into a really strong cheesy flavor. That lack of an intense cheesy flavor also makes the sloppy seconds I have with my fingers, sucking off the light orange seasoning, less delectable.

The Kettle Brand Nacho Cheddar TIAS! may not be healthier, as cheesy or as crunchy as Doritos, but they’re an extremely satisfying smug replacement.

Every year, Kettle Brand potato chips has a Create-a-Chip Challenge that allows fans of the brand to create a new flavor for the company. Past winning flavors include: Spicy Thai, Buffalo Bleu and Tuscan Three Cheese. This year’s winning flavor is the Fully Loaded Baked Potato.

If you’re not familiar with a fully loaded baked potato, it’s a potato that’s baked in an oven to make the insides all fluffy. After it reaches that point, it’s cut open with a knife and then waterboarded with sour cream, green onions, cheese and bacon, until it’s an unhealthy shell of its former self. These new baked potato flavored potato chips take sour cream, green onions, cheddar cheese and bacon and slaps it on Kettle’s crunchy chips.

I enjoy Kettle Brand Potato Chips and I love baked potatoes that have been waterboarded with sour cream, green onions, cheese and bacon, so I look forward to trying these.

Hot off the heels of their Death Valley Chipotle Potato Chips, Kettle Brand recently introduced their Jalapeno flavored chips, which they describe as, “Striking a perfect balance between fresh, well-rounded flavor and the simple spicy bite of green jalapeno peppers.”

Being a fan of Kettle Brand Potato Chips and jalapenos (I once drank the juice from a jar of pickled jalapenos for two dollars), I’m eager to give these a try. Look for it in grocery and hippie natural food stores nationwide. They will be available in 2 oz., 5 oz., and 9 oz. bags.

Oh my God! The Kettle Chips Death Valley Chipotle feels like someone is pouring liquid chlamydia into my mouth! It burns! It burns! It burns!

Okay, it’s not really that hot to me, but others might feel that way.

The winner of last year’s Kettle Peoples’ Choice contest is quite possibly the spiciest potato chip I’ve ever had, although I might’ve in the past had a potato chip that was so spicy that it traumatized me and caused me to lose any memory of it. Eating something so disturbing and losing my memory of it has happened before.

The Kettle Chips Death Valley Chipotle contains the Five Peppers of the Hotpocalypse: chili, chipotle, cayenne, habanero, and jalapeno. Thanks to those spices, each chip looks like it’s burnt rather than golden brown and they also look like scabs. The heat from the Five Peppers of the Hotpocalypse does not instantly hit you, like walking out of a Las Vegas casino on a hot summer day after 24 hours straight of debauchery, instead it’s a slow burn that builds up to a medium heat that sticks with you for a while.

While it may contain a spectrum of hot spices, the chipotle is the pepper that stands out the most and also provides a nice smoky flavor, which fortunately isn’t overwhelmed by the heat of the other peppers. Its smokiness combined with its spiciness makes for one delicious chip, although its heat will probably agitate some peoples’ palates. I’m not surprised I enjoyed them because I like spicy and I also believe Kettle Chips makes some of the best tasting potato chips on the planet.

So if you like spicy, I’d definitely recommend the crunchy Kettle Chips Death Valley Chipotle potato chips. But if you don’t like spicy, I’d definitely recommend staying away from these chips because it really will feel like someone is pouring liquid chlamydia into your mouth.